Is Trump the last TV president? Or, the first digital one?

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President Donald Trump speaks during a news conference with Estonian President Kersti Kaljulaid, Latvian President Raimonds Vejonis, and Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaite, in the East Room of the White House in Washington, Tuesday, April 3, 2018. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

From the standpoint of technology — and today, technology is disrupting life more than anything else — the most important thing about President Trump is his transitional character.

So far, his divided political sensibilities, half Steve Bannon and half Chuck Schumer, have not resulted in a discernible transition. (If Democrats take Congress this election year, that could soon change.) His attitudes and instincts regarding media are also deeply mixed. But there’s little doubt that, when it comes to media, he is strongly influencing one of the all-time greatest changes in American life: the change between television culture and internet culture.

In one sense, President Trump is so noteworthy and influential precisely because he made the leap from TV to online civilization in a way so very few of his contemporaries have managed to do. His instinctual grasp of online communication, and his frankness, or shamelessness, in fully embracing or exploiting its potential, put him at a colossal advantage relative to his competitors for the presidency — in both parties.

But in another, Trump’s use of online communication portentously mirrors the troublesome, even failing ways the big social media companies have tried to define and control digital life. For although Trump is almost the embodiment of Twitter today, he is stalwart in his refusal to let go of cable television as a measure of meaning and a reference point for reality.

Although he seems to be a master of “going viral” in the digital sense of forcing systems to reproduce and distribute content the systems do not want to spread, it often seems as if his relish for digital communication is ultimately in the service of pre-digital, electric modes of communication and value.

Trump’s use of digital virtuosity as a means to the higher end of electric virtuosity follows the same pattern controversially adopted by Facebook and Google.

Now that Facebook realizes it can’t abdicate responsibility for enabling “everyone” to become their own virtual TV channel, Mark Zuckerberg is furiously signaling his willingness to let government take on the responsibility for regulating and censoring the multitude of personal broadcasts carried by the social network.

Even more explicitly, Google’s YouTube faces similar challenges, with similar “solutions” on the way, for similar reasons. Consider the shocking recent shooting at YouTube headquarters, perpetrated by a woman on the sociopolitical left embittered by YouTube’s censorship and demonetization of her personal broadcasts.

That “surprise” event, more predictable or logical than it seems, augurs a move by the digital behemoth to follow Facebook’s lead in working with government to make the online experience more and more like the TV experience of old — when a tiny handful of huge broadcast companies closely regulated by government delivered officially virtuous content to mass audiences.

Of course, social media’s attempt to cram the disruptions of digital life back into the reassuringly controlled and controlling framework of the electric TV era of communication still faces a high hurdle. TV didn’t harvest massive amounts of personal information from viewers. It didn’t have to. In order for the “broadcast for everyone” model of social media to work, companies do need to hoover up that content — because users need to supply it in order for the platforms to flourish (and even simply to exist).

At the same time, importantly, the digital threat to the merely electric medium of television has forced TV to confront some existential questions of its own. The online stampede, and the wave of cord-cutting and on-demand viewing that came with it, has caused TV companies to bet their survival on their ability to pull off the dizzyingly recursive feat of putting TV-like online content back into the television set.

But this is just treading water to survive for a few more virtual moments. What TV needs to avoid collapse is people who use digital communications as little more than a tool for gaining access to TV exposure — people who want to capture the general imagination through mass media broadcasts much more than they want to activate the shared memories and identities of niche groups in the divided and narrow-cast digital realm.

Surprise, surprise: the biggest, most powerful, and most influential of all those such people is President Trump himself.

In that sense, it’s fatally misleading to see Trump as the first digital president. It’s far more likely he will be the last television president. Already, it feels like it would be only a slight exaggeration to say that Trump is shaping up to be TV’s last gasp. As everyone from Jimmy Kimmel to Anderson Cooper to Roseanne Barr amply reveals, it’s all but impossible to sustain general, everyday relevance on television today without focusing content and attention unremittingly around Trump.

Alas, even that strategy is failing — for the same reason that digital life is constantly slipping free of the controls that government censorship-friendly social media companies are increasingly willing to use the broadcast model to impose. The internet is just too big and too bad — bigger and badder by far than President Trump. What is an epochal sensation on TV (Stormy Daniels, anyone?) is yesterday’s news online. TV is out of trumps. And digital is just getting started.

James Poulos is an editorial writer and columnist for the Southern California News Group.